First off, this is no census. A census collects data from every individual in a given subset. This is merely a survey. Further, it is voluntary so there will be no indication whether the sample is representative or not. OpenLogic is not the first to try and mislead people this way - Australian company Waugh Partners used the same misleading nomenclature for a survey and released the results earlier this year.

Nobody, but nobody, has ever managed to collect reliable data about open source for the simple reason that it is open source. You download what you want and use it.And even if you buy it, there is no tedious registration that logs everything you do so that some big brother sitting in another galaxy can monitor what you are doing.

When one looks at the names of companies sponsoring this "census", one stands out - Microsoft. This is just the latest case of the company pouring money into activities which have the open source halo around them.

Earlier this year, Microsoft was the biggest sponsor of the 2008 community choice awards given by SourceForge.net, which claims to be the world’s largest open source software development and distribution environment. It is part of the same group that includes Slashdot and Linux.com.

Microsoft was also a major sponsor of the recent open source convention hosted by book publisher O'Reilly Media.

The way OpenLogic conducts the survey is by providing software that can be downloaded and used by an individual to collect details about the software being run on a given computer. This includes open source software running on Windows, Solaris and the BSDs.

The company offers two reasons for collecting this data - to count the usage of open source software in businesses and to use that data to promote the use of more open source software. Company representative Kim Wein proferred these reasons during an interview by one R. Scott Boulder of Linux.com at the recent LinuxWorld Expo. Robin Miller of Linux.com edited the video of the interview which is now being paraded as a news item on the site.